Chris Bradford on Austin, economics and other stuff

January 07, 2009

An outbreak of salmonella food poisoning has made 388 people sick across 42 states, sending 18 percent of them to the hospital, U.S. health officials said on Wednesday.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is trying to trace the source of the outbreak, which began in September. The Department of Agriculture, state health officials and the Food and Drug Administration are also involved.

The CDC said poultry, cheese and eggs are the most common source of this particular strain, known as Salmonella typhimurium.

Or maybe not. Perhaps chastened by the wanton damage it needlessly inflicted on tomato growers (and tomato consumers) last year, the CDC appears to be taking a more conservative approach this time:

"Because foods of animal origin may be contaminated with Salmonella, people should not eat raw or undercooked eggs, poultry, or meat. Persons also should not consume raw or unpasteurized milk or other dairy products. Produce should be thoroughly washed," [the CDC spokesman] said.

August 14, 2008

A couple of days ago, Freakonomics' Stephen Dubner hosted a round-table on the future of suburbia. As happens too often, James "sackcloth-and-ashes" Kunstler got a seat.

Kunstler doesn't like cities, suburbs, or any other large agglomeration of people so he fantasizes that high gas prices will extinguish them. He's a jumble of apocalyptic prophecies, loony economics, and . . . Well, I could tell you, but it is better just to show you.

Here is Kunstler's Freakonomics piece; my comments are in bold.

There are many ways of describing the fiasco of suburbia, but these days I refer to it as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

Personally, I would have gone with World War II — trillions of dollars allocated to the slaughter of 50-60 million people. But, sure, I can see how building lots of tract housing would be a close second.

I say this because American suburbia requires an infinite supply of cheap energy —

I suspect that Kunstler actually hails from one of those isolated New Guinea tribes discovered in the 1960s who use the word “many” for any number greater than three. Kunstler doesn’t know any meaningful way to describe how much energy our suburbs actually use, so he just says “infinite,” which is the Kunstler tribe’s word for “too much” —

. . . in order to function and we have now entered a permanent global energy crisis that will change the whole equation of daily life. Having poured a half-century of our national wealth into a living arrangement with no future — and linked our very identity with it — we have provoked a powerful psychology of previous investment . . .

“provoked a powerful psychology of previous investment”? Jimmy’s been reading Derrida, or somebody. Maybe this person.

. . . that will make it difficult for us to let go, change our behavior, and make other arrangements.

Compounding the problem is the fact that we ditched our manufacturing economy . . .

We certainly wouldn't be in the mess we’re in if most of us were still employed manufacturing automobiles, refrigerators, and barbecue grills.

. . .. for a suburban sprawl building economy (a.k.a. “the housing bubble”), meaning we came to base our economy on building even more stuff with no future.

We now have cold, hard evidence that Kunstler doesn’t know what he's talking about. The “suburban sprawl building economy” is not “also known as” the “housing bubble”; the sprawl-building economy has been around for decades while the housing bubble is a phenomenon of the last few years. And the housing bubble was least pronounced in some of the places that have the most suburbs (Dallas, Houston). This man is deeply confused. And about suburbia, the only thing he writes about.

This is a hell of a problem, since it is at once economic, socio-political, and circumstantial.

“Circumstantial?” He's lost me.

Here’s what I think will happen: First, we are in great danger of mounting a futile campaign to sustain the unsustainable, that is, of defending suburbia at all costs.

In fact, it is already underway. One symptom of this is that the only subject under discussion about our energy predicament is how can we keep running all our cars by other means. Even the leading environmentalists talk of little else.

Kunstler’s not reading the same environmentalists I am. The environmentalists I read range from the sensible (impose a carbon tax) to the fringe who gleefully welcome the demise of the automobile. I guess they are talking about the automobile, but they’re certainly not mounting a campaign to save it, which is what he implies.

Of course no combination of alt fuels can save us. It takes an “infinite” amount of energy to run the highways, Wal-Marts and Walt Disney World, and we all know that the amount of energy in the universe is finite.

Does Disney World use that much energy, anyway? I figured Disney would be leading the parade of green-washing corporations. Anyway, it’s compact and walkable, which is what Kunstler wants. Sure the rides use energy, but roller coasters use energy for only half the ride; the other half is free, courtesy of gravity. We need more transportation that’s half free. (I know this is bogus, folks, but Kunstlerites will never be able to figure out why.)

The automobile will be a diminishing presence in our lives, whether we like it or not.

Really, I don’t see why Disney World is a big problem. Unless you believe that in the near-distant future, all interstate travel will be impossible, why would Disney World disappear?

Further proof of our obdurate cluelessness in these matters is the absence of any public discussion about restoring the passenger railroad system — even as the airline industry is also visibly dying. The campaign to sustain suburbia and all its entitlements will result in a tragic squandering of our dwindling resources and capital.

I admit I haven’t been to Disney World in twenty-five years, but I liked it OK. There’s supposed to be lots of cool new stuff, but I assume Epcot still sucks.

The suburbs have three destinies, none of them exclusive: as materials salvage, as slums, and as ruins. In any case, the suburbs will lose value dramatically, both in terms of usefulness and financial investment.

Usefulness and financial investment, surprisingly, are correlated.

Most of the fabric of suburbia will not be “fixed” or retrofitted, in particular the residential subdivisions. They were built badly in the wrong places. We will have to return to traditional modes of inhabiting the landscape — villages, towns, and cities, composed of walkable neighborhoods and business districts — and the successful ones will have to exist in relation to a productive agricultural hinterland, because petro-agriculture (as represented by the infamous 3000-mile Caesar salad) is also now coming to an end.

That particular salad’s notoriety was richly deserved. On its 3,000-mile joyride from Los Angeles to New York, it looted two banks, robbed three post offices, and terrorized the citizens of Topeka, all while burning 200,000 gallons of fuel and emitting 3.5 million metric tons of CO2. But I think Mr. Kunstler is unfairly implying that all Caesar salads are bad actors; I've known lots of salads who've gone about their business conscientiously, day-in and day-out, and never strayed more than 100 miles from home. Mr. Kunstler owes our produce an apology.

Fortunately, we have many under-activated small towns and small cities in favorable locations near waterways.

My home town in Mississippi was activated last year; it got stationed in Karbala.

This will be increasingly important as transport of goods by water regains importance.

We face an epochal demographic shift, but not the one that is commonly expected: from suburbs to big cities. Rather, we are in for a reversal of the 200-year-long trend of people moving from the farms and small towns to the big cities.

Right. Because the first thing people will do when the cost of transportation rises is move farther apart.

Oh, and I assume that’s a misprint in the second-to-last line; “200” should read “4000.”

People will be moving to the smaller towns and smaller cities because they are more appropriately scaled to the limited energy diet of the future.

Energy ultimately matters because people use it to generate something of value to themselves or to others. What we ought to care about is the amount of output one person can generate with one unit of energy, a concept I’m sure is totally out of Kunstler’s reach.

Big cities offer economies of scale that make people more productive. That’s a fundamental reason why people live in them. For example, Californians — large-city dwellers — have a per capita GDP about 50% higher than that of Mississippians, who mostly dwell in small towns. Californians are much more productive than Mississippians, and a lot of that edge comes from living in big cities.

Thus, for Mississippians to generate more output per unit of energy consumed, they have to use much less energy per capita than Californians. Now, there’s no reason to expect this to be true because there is no reason to expect small towns to be more energy-efficient than big cities: (1) small towns are less dense than big cities, and thus require more infrastructure — particularly roads – per inhabitant; (2) there’s no mass transit in small towns, and it’s not economical to install it; (3) there are fewer economies of scale in small towns — it doesn’t take 10 times as much energy to treat water for 10 times as many people. About the only thing you can say for small towns, from the “circumstantial of energy conservation psychology,” is that they’re less congested.

And, surprise, the data bear this out. In 2005, California had more than 12 times as many people as Mississippi, but California as a whole consumed only 8 times as much energy as Mississippi. This means that Mississippians used 50% more energy per capita than Californians. The city-dwelling Californians’ superior energy efficiency and their superior productivity combine to make them twice as productive, per unit of energy, than small-town-dwelling Mississippians.

When a resource like energy becomes more expensive, the market automatically directs it to more productive uses, not less productive. More productive uses outbid less productive uses. If Kunstler knew the first thing about economics or cities, he’d know that rising energy costs will encourage people to move from small towns to big cities, not the other way around.

I believe our big cities will contract substantially — even if they densify back around their old cores and waterfronts. They are products, largely, of the 20th-century cheap energy fiesta and they will be starved in the decades ahead.

No, suburbs may depend on cheap energy, but our cities are largely products of economies of scale. See above.

One popular current fantasy I hear often is that apartment towers are the “greenest” mode of human habitation.

Harvard urban economist Ed Glaeser is one of these fantasists. Glaeser is a lot smarter than me, and all evidence indicates that I’m a lot smarter than Kunstler. With a nod to the principle of transitivity, my money’s on Glaeser. (Glaeser at least knows what “infinite” means.)

On the contrary, we will discover that the skyscraper is an obsolete building type, and that cities overburdened with them will suffer a huge liability — Manhattan and Chicago being the primary examples. Cities composed mostly of suburban-type fabric — Houston, Atlanta, Orlando, et al — will also depreciate sharply.

As petro-agriculture implodes, we’ll have to raise our food differently, closer to home, and at a finer and smaller scale.

Speaking of fantasies, this one is popular among the peasant wing of the environmentalist movement. As energy becomes more expensive, it will become more important, not less, to take advantage of economies of scale in agriculture. Serfs with scythes and oxen aren’t very productive. There’s a reason urbanization has always been tied to agriculture productivity.

This new agricultural landscape will be inhabited differently, since farming will require more human attention. The places that are not able to grow enough food locally are not likely to make it. Phoenix and Las Vegas will be shadows of what they are now, if they exist at all.

I’ve explained before why the “local food” movement is misguided, at least when energy efficiency is the concern.

These days, an awful lot of people — the production builders, the realtors — are waiting for the “bottom” in the real-estate industry with hopes that the suburban house-building orgy will resume. They are waiting in vain. The project of suburbia is over. We will build no more of it.

If I can point him to a subdivision now under construction, do you think he’ll agree to go away?

Now we’re stuck with what’s there. Sometimes whole societies make unfortunate decisions or go down tragic pathways. Suburbia was ours.

I think I'm beginning to get this guy. Kunstler, I think, has turned himself into a cottage industry by making flamboyant, absurd predictions that he frankly has no interest in verifying. He’s less interested in his claims' veracity than their sound-bitedness. That sells more books.

The tomato growers, not surprisingly, want the U.S. government to compensate them for the havoc it wreaked. To the tune of $100 million. Note that this probably understates the total cost. $100 million is the tomato growers and shippers' estimate of their own damages. The total cost including losses to downstream users, particularly restaurants, is much higher. (I can personally attest that Chipotle lost several lunch sales while it was out of salsa.)

Should the government compensate tomato growers?

I don't think tomato growers have a compelling equitable case. Over the long run, the price of produce ought to reflect the risk of random, FDA-induced scares. Think of FDA as a freak hailstorm or 100-year flood; a portion of the price of produce reflects the cost to growers of self-insuring against government-induced catastrophe. Compensating tomato growers may give them a windfall.

The real case for compensation is that the government needs proper incentives. If it doesn't pay for the damage caused by bogus scares, it has an incentive to over-warn. FDA officials face political punishment for acting too slowly to quell a genuine outbreak, but little sanction other than embarrassment for acting too aggressively. And since FDA has the experts, it is difficult for the public to assess whether it indeed acted too aggressively.

The solution is to have Congress pay compensation on a case-by-case basis. Presumably, FDA officials want to protect their budget, and it is a bad budget-preservation strategy to force your paymasters to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars for your blunders.

Yes, there are problems with this. It is difficult even for Congress to determine when FDA has blundered. And making growers unconditionally responsible for outbreaks gives them an incentive to police their industry. But we don't want to encourage over-policing -- we don't want to pay for too much safety -- and FDA overreactions don't give anyone the right incentives.

As sicknesses continue beyond the shelf life of tomatoes — it’s been almost three months since the first Salmonella case — officials are also starting to question whether another vegetable is to blame, according to this morning’s USA Today..

“We’re broadening the investigation to be sure it encompasses food items that are commonly consumed with tomatoes,” Robert Tauxe of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

I think the good doctor is just trying to reassure us. "Food items that are commonly consumed with tomatoes" sounds suspiciously like "the general food supply"; after all, what's not "commonly consumed with tomatoes"? This means that any one of us could be exposed to salmonella at any time. Why, you could be eating a big bowl of salmonella-tainted spaghetti right now.

We're screwed.

Right.

I originally planned to write this up as a possible instance of observation bias:

FDA detected a random cluster of reported salmonella cases and put out the alert. It didn't know whether the cluster was due to chance or to a genuine outbreak, but it gets in trouble for not warning, so it figured it was safer to over-warn.

Doctors everywhere, alerted to a possible outbreak of salmonella poisoning, began looking for salmonella poisoning.

The symptoms of salmonella poisoning are headache, diarrhea, nausea, fever, and abdominal cramps, symptoms that doctors ordinarily would have been content to diagnose as "stomach virus." But doctors instead screened these patients for salmonella poisoning. They asked them if they'd recently eaten tomatoes -- and many had, since many of them had recently eaten food. Rather than send them straight home with some Tylenol and Phenergan, the doctors sent them to the lab to be tested for salmonella.

As I said, that was my original take. But I now think this story is too charitable to FDA. It doesn't sound like there was an outbreak at all.

FDA has counted 810 cases since April 23, a period of two months. 810 cases every two months is equivalent to a rate of 4,860 cases per year. 4,860 cases per year is not an epidemic. It's not even the background rate:

It is estimated that from 2 to 4 million cases of salmonellosis occur in the U.S. annually. (Source: FDA Bad Bug Book) ...Every year, approximately 40,000 cases of salmonellosis are reported in the United States. Because many milder cases are not diagnosed or reported, the actual number of infections may be twenty or more times greater. (Source: excerpt from Salmonellosis (General): DBMD)

We are a nation of 300 million people who occasionally consume undercooked poultry and bad eggs and other food that tasted a little funny at the time. Some of us will get salmonellosis. "Some" of 300 million is "a lot" -- on average, 10 times as many confirmed cases as the Great Salmonella Poisoning Outbreak of 2008. And that's before subtracting the extra cases doctors have detected this year because they were specifically looking for them.

Thus, to save the general population from a risk of salmonella poisoning well below the background risk, FDA has given restaurants a $100 million butt-kicking and forced the rest of us to go for weeks without a decent salad or fajita.

They know they've screwed up:

“It’s bad, and I think everyone will be very apologetic” if it turns out tomatoes weren’t the source, said Tim Jones, Tennessee’s state epidemiologist, describing himself as “increasingly concerned” about whether tomatoes are to blame.

June 19, 2008

Is the salmonella-tainted tomato "scare" over? The New York Times reports:

Six new cases of an unusual form of salmonella linked to eating raw tomatoes have been confirmed in New York City, in addition to a previously known case, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said on Wednesday. In addition, Suffolk County announced that a 26-year-old West Babylon man also contracted the strain of salmonella from eating tomatoes at New York City on May 27.

Maybe I have an undue attachment to pico de gallo, but I was upset when my restaurants pulled tomatoes off the menu. I was cheerfully willing to accept the tiny risk of encountering Mr. Salmonella.

There have been 383 cases of tomato-related salmonella reported since April. Even if all the cases occurred in April, that's just 12-13 cases a day. By contrast, 6 billion pounds of fresh tomatoes* are consumed each year by 300 million Americans spread over a market area of 3 million square miles. I would be flabbergasted if only a couple handfuls (literally) of the tomatoes consumed each day were contaminated with some bacteria. Fresh produce always has a chance of being contaminated with something. It's an extremely small chance, though -- I imagine it is zero, to five significant digits, even when there is a confirmed "outbreak." My chance of ending up with a contaminated tomato is still practically indistinguishable from zero.

When the FDA detects an outbreak of salmonella, it ought to investigate. We ought to work hard to get tainted food out of the system. But there will always be some bad stuff out there no matter how hard we try. Don't mess with my pico unless there's a real epidemic.

June 08, 2008

Evidence of the really top-notch analysis my readers get for free, day in and day out . . .

I've argued before that those who worry about how far their food travels are focusing on the wrong thing. Here's some of what I wrote back in April:

The food-milers make another mistake, perhaps one worse than fixating on the wrong metric. They ignore the fact that lots of energy is used at every step of the soil-to-plate cycle. Fertilizer. Irrigation. Tilling. Harvesting. Storage. Processing. Transportation. Everyone knows that the recent surge in food prices was caused by the sustained surge in fuel prices (aggravated by the government's edict that we fuel our cars with food).

This is an important reason not to worry about fuel miles. It's actually very, very tricky to calculate the amount of energy used to get food from the ground to the market. Growing conditions matter a lot. Florida growers can grow 2 or 3 times or more tomatoes per acre than Texas growers. Local growers thus start at a huge energy disadvantage unless they are using radical farming methods that use no energy (also known as "subsistence farming"). It's quite possible that they cannot close the energy gap despite their advantage in transportation costs.

[T]wo Carnegie Mellon researchers recently broke down the carbon footprint of foods, and their findings were a bit surprising. 83 percent of emissions came from the growth and production of the food itself. Only 11 percent came from transportation, and even then, only 4 percent came from the transportation between grower and seller (which is the part that eating local helps cut). Additionally, food shipped from far off may be better for the environment than food shipped within the country -- ocean travel is much more efficient than trucking.

In other words, if you're worried about minimizing the energy used to get food to your table, you're better off asking whether it was grown in the most energy-efficient environment (i.e., the soil quality and growing conditions) rather than how far it traveled.

April 18, 2008

I certainly don't care if someone wants to eats locally grown food. If you prefer local food because it is fresher or tastier, great. If you enjoy shopping at the farmer's market, swell. Prefer local varieties? Happy hunting.

The "eat local" crowd does a fair amount of moralizing, though. They frequently suggest that we all ought to be buying locally-grown food. How far our food travels evidently has become a moralissue. By reducing our food-miles, the argument goes, we will reduce our fuel consumption.

But "food-miles" is the wrong metric. The correct metric is the amount of fuel used to transport a pound of food (or some other given amount). We don't care how far our tomato traveled; we care how much fuel it took to get it from there to here.

I'm skeptical that moving food even long distances has to use much fuel per pound. For example, an 18-wheeler can haul 30,000 pounds of tomatoes 1,500 miles from Florida to Texas at 5 mpg. That's a hundred pounds per gallon. At $4/gallon of diesel . . . I'll save you the arithmetic: that works out to just 4 cents to move one pound. You'll burn more fuel per pound making a separate trip to the grocery store for bread and milk. You'll probably burn more fuel per pound just backing your car out of the driveway to make a separate trip for bread and milk.

I realize it costsa lot more than 4 cents/pound to move those tomatoes from Florida to Texas. The trucker has to be paid, the trucking company gets its cut, etc. But we're worried about fuel. A pound of food can travel a long way on just a tiny amount of fuel.

The food-milers make another mistake, perhaps one worse than fixating on the wrong metric. They ignore the fact that lots of energy is used at every step of the soil-to-plate cycle. Fertilizer. Irrigation. Tilling. Harvesting. Storage. Processing. Transportation. Everyone knows that the recent surge in food prices was caused by the sustained surge in fuel prices (aggravated by the government's edict that we fuel our cars with food).

This is an important reason not to worry about fuel miles. It's actually very, very tricky to calculate the amount of energy used to get food from the ground to the market. Growing conditions matter a lot. Florida growers can grow 2 or 3 times or more tomatoes per acre than Texas growers. Local growers thus start at a huge energy disadvantage unless they are using radical farming methods that use no energy (also known as "subsistence farming"). It's quite possible that they cannot close the energy gap despite their advantage in transportation costs.

Because the cost of energy makes up such a large percentage of the cost of food, it makes no sense to minimize just one component of the energy cost. You'll be apt to maximize something else. Just look at the price. It may not be a perfect indicator of your food's energy cost, but it is the most reliable indicator you've got.